Belkin quits. How loyal are sponsors of cycling teams?

Last year, Belkin became the title sponsor of the former Rabobank cycling team, but today it announced that it will end its sponsorship by the end of the year. Various commentators have expressed concern over the lack of continuity in sponsoring. Which raises the question: is it normal for a sponsor to quit after such a short period? And is this becoming worse?

Some sponsors leave after one or two years, while others remain loyal for ten years or more (Française des Jeux, Lampre, Lotto, Quick Step).

The graph above shows the sponsor turnover of UCI Pro Tour teams (the share of sponsors that would quit the subsequent year). Turnover is about 25%, which suggests that a normal sponsorship duration should be about four years. So Belkin’s loyalty is not impressive by those standards.

While the sponsorship duration fluctuates, there doesn’t appear to be a trend of sponsors becoming more or less loyal.

Method

I retrieved sponsor names from team names of UCI Pro Tour teams listed by Cycling News. Due to variations in spelling (Française des Jeux, FDJ, FDJ.fr), the data needed some cleaning up. If you want to check them: here’s a list of sponsors and the years in which I think they were active.